Every couple months there seems to be an incremental update on the feature film version of 24. Most of these updates amount to saying that the project isn’t dead yet, but that it isn’t really moving full steam ahead, either.

Now Mark Bomback (Unstoppable, Live Free or Die Hard, Total Recall) is about to turn in a new draft that would put Kiefer Sutherland back in the Jack Bauer role, and Deadline says that Fox has a director shortlist with about five names. Yeah, there’s always a director shortlist when a project is at this stage, and even the most notable fact of this update, that Tony Scott is no longer attached and isn’t part of that shortlist, isn’t really a surprise given the fact that his attachment always seemed very loose at best. The site says Kiefer Sutherland is available starting in April 2012, and that’s when Fox wants to shoot the movie.

This makes just a small push from the timeline that has been casually discussed by participants in the past. In October, Sutherland said the script was almost done,

We are coming very close to having a finished script. That’s been the most difficult thing. You have to remember that we have 24 hours to explain the stories in 24 and so trying to condense that into a two-hour film version has been a real shift in gear for us. We were originally trying to make it too big and put too much into it – but once we relaxed, we found out how to tell that story. So yes we definitely do plan on making the film.

Other statements this year had put the hopeful timeline for the shoot as December 2011 or January 2012. Not bad for a show that wrapped a year and a half ago — 24 is actually moving to the big screen pretty quickly, as these things go.